Andrew Liszewski

Up until now the divide and conquer technique was mankind's best approach to quelling any robot uprisings. But now that self-assembling swarm bots—scary in their own right—are teaming up with eye-in-the-sky drones to tackle tricky obstacles, we're pretty much screwed.

Demonstrated by a team of researchers at the 2012 Intelligent Robots and Systems conference, this little army of swarm bots is able to communicate with an overhead drone by simply using a series of flashing, colored LED lights. This system not only lets the drone communicate with a specific robot, but also pass along instructions. All without the need for a wireless signal that could be easily jammed. Here the technology is used to push a jug into the corner of a room, but how long before it's used to push a jug onto someone's head? [Automaton]